Best known for his witty, daring and extraordinarily luxurious fabrics, Christian Lacroix’s big mens clothing were a riotous mix of color, print and texture. He brought new life to couture during the 1980s, a decade epitomized by its decadence, musing that he ‘was dressing a new generation of young beautiful people who want luxurious but witty clothes’.
Lacroix is described as a fashion historian, costumier and big & tall mens clothing designer. His designs were deeply influenced by his home of Aries, primitive and naive painting, gypsies, bullfighting and folk costumes of the region. He also drew reference liberally from fashion history. Initially designing for Jean Patou for five years, he opened his own couture and ready-to-wear house in 1987, which was the first couture house to open in Paris since 1962.
Described in Rolling Stone magazine as ‘the gimme decade’, the 1980s were a period of gross materialism. Lacroix’s work was a reflection of popular culture, combining embroidery, patchwork, fur, lace and prints in the one outfit to create a fashion ‘pastiche’.
His use of startling colors and extraordinary accessories became a fine way of advertising one’s wealth and status in society, which had become excessively consumer-oriented by this time.
Bursting onto the scene in 1986 with his famous bouffant or ‘pouf cocktail dresses, Lacroix was awarded the Ded’Orot the Golden Thimble, a prize awarded by the international press for the best couture collection of the year. His bubble skirts were quickly copied, both by other designers and the high street, and became a staple of the late 1980s society party scene. All of Lacroix’s clothes were cut very precisely and outfits often included corsets, drapes, frills, ruffles, jewels and numerous other forms of decoration. Many of the fabrics in the couture line were one-off creations by crafts people and textile artists. As a darling of the fashion media, John Fairchild at Women’s Wear Daily named Lacroix as one of the top six designers in 1989 and ‘the’ designer of ‘over-the-top’ design for the decade.
Lacroix has been compared to Karl Lagerfeld - both men were design geniuses, ambitious and witty - yet their designs were completely different. His first collection was seen as the most innovative statement since Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent. However, by the early 1990s, the lavishness of the previous decade, embodied in Lacroix’s collections, could not be sustained and haute couture sales slumped.